President Obama’s planned speech to the nation’s schoolchildren on education draws this reaction from a Douglas County mom: “I don’t want that man talking to my children. Look at other leaders who had socialistic policies and chose to talk to children; this would include Hitler, Stalin, Lenin and Castro. I will keep my kids home from school that day and we will re-read the Declaration of Independence.”

On this same topic, an old friend, conservative and apparently growing more conservative by the second, sends me an e-mail.

Subject line: O-scumma.

He writes that if President Bush had pulled this stunt the “stinkin’ liberals” would be in an uproar. Am I, he asks, as outraged as he?

My friend is aware, of course, that I’m a stinkin’ liberal, a stinkin’ liberal who writes about education. I figure he knows I’m outraged. Not because, heaven help us, President Obama plans to urge students to do well in school. Not because Obama has chosen to convey this message from Wakefield High, a successful Arlington, Va., public school full of Latino and black students from low-income families.

No, if I am outraged it is because as successes go, Wakefield High School is one of the exceptions. It is because for decades now, low-income, minority students have failed in or been failed by our schools. Because they lag far behind their white, middle-class peers. Because I reported one year from a high school where most students were Latino and 700 started as freshmen and 200 graduated four years later. Because when I did the research, I discovered most students in the school who could not do grade-level work were behind in third grade — and they never caught up.

Because I sat next to a Latino student, an average American kid, who somehow had made it to ninth grade without being able to solve a third-grade math problem.

You want outrage? How’s that?

The Department of Education’s lesson plans accompanying Tuesday’s speech are what have set most critics off. “Indoctrination,” is the cry. Gone now is the question on how students might help the president.

The lesson plans are optional and are, in their own way, just one more depressing aspect of this episode in our national discourse. “What specific job is the president asking me to do? Is there anything he asked of anyone else? Teacher? Principals? Parents? The American people?” “If you were president what would you ask students to do?”

Some people see Hitler in these questions. I see the prescriptive hand of bureaucrats. It’s predictable fare giving little credit to classroom teachers who actually do this kind of thing for a living.

We’re in another looking-glass moment. I can’t pretend to understand the objections of those certain that evil President Obama seeks to brainwash our children into his sinister socialist world views by asking students to stay in school.

We have school districts in this state, as elsewhere, where administrators are quaking from the shouts of parents who don’t want their children “indoctrinated.” We have emergency staff meetings and principals forbidding teachers from showing the speech in school and principals declaring every teacher shall show the speech and parents saying they will pull their children out of class and schools offering to usher the children of offended parents into other classrooms while the president speaks. All of this is ludicrous, a waste of valuable time and energy.

What lousy role models we can be to our children. I include myself in this. Driven by fear, reacting with scorn, prisoners of our own biases.

Where would stinkin’ liberals have been if President Bush pulled the same stunt? Decrying his political machinations, no doubt. And Republicans, where would they have been? You don’t need to answer that. Neither party is short of hypocrites.

You may look at Obama on television and see a politician with whom you agree or disagree, but he is something else too. He is the son of an immigrant, abandoned by his father, raised by his mother. He is a black man who studied hard, who excelled in college and who, only 10 months ago, made history when he was elected leader of this country.

The president hopes to inspire all children in this country to go to class, to do their homework, to believe that if they do the work, education will open doors to worlds they cannot even imagine.

But he chose to deliver that message from a school that brims with promise for a reason. He chose a school full of brown and black children from struggling families because they are the children he once was, and he is the success they could one day become. If they work hard. If they believe in themselves. If people believe in them.

If that’s indoctrination, then I only have one thing left to say:

Preach it, Mr. President. Preach it.

Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.

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